Photo: Ana María Buitrón 

Exploring Fume, Root, Seed, Isadora Romero’s exhibition at neimënster, feels like a moment of slow food for the soul. The world outside and inside calms. Time stills. You’re swept along like one of the seeds at the heart of her work – carried by ancestral winds, drifting across borders, rooted in stories.

This multi-chapter exhibition is a deeply personal and meticulously researched inquiry into seeds – not just as agricultural matter, but as carriers of memory, resistance, and identity. Romero began the journey in 2017 where she interviewed social organisations fighting land inequity, biodiversity loss and lack of food sovereignty. But, when the pandemic hit in 2020 and public transport ceased, she asked her father, a Colombian native who emigrated to Ecuador, to drive her to the interviews.

“He told me, ‘that’s very interesting because your grandfather and your great-grandmother were seed guardians’,” she recalls, adding: “He told me that three years after I started working on this project, it was mind-blowing! I felt there was something inside me that needed to tell these stories.”

The work exhibited was the fruit of a journey that took her to Paraguay, Ecuador, Mexico, her father’s native Colombia, and Luxembourg, where Romero spent a month as artist in residence at the Abbaye de Neimënster.

75% Of Seed Varieties Lost

Her work illuminates a stark reality: since the 20th century, over 75% of seed varieties have been lost due to industrial agriculture, monoculture, and the global push for high-yield crops. Through her work, she shows that loss is more than biological – it’s cultural, spiritual, ancestral. Colonisation, forced displacement, and systemic erasure have decimated traditional farming knowledge and, with it, the seeds that encoded those memories.

And yet, Romero’s voice throughout the exhibition resists despair. Her approach is generous, celebratory, even hopeful. Rather than giving in to hopelessness, she centres the resistance and resilience of the people and the land, allowing us to see what is possible. There’s a quiet radicalism in this. The land enters the gallery space – not as spectacle, but as kin.

Then We Tame the Fire: Mexico (2023–24)

In this chapter, Romero traces corn’s ancestral legacy and its struggle to survive in modern Mexico. Once the sacred centre of life, corn is now threatened by the rise of agave farming for tequila – more profitable but far less nourishing. Agave displaces not only crops but communities, eroding food sovereignty and disrupting centuries-old ecological balance.

Romero threads this story through time, juxtaposing ancient cultivation with the present. The chapter’s title, Then We Tame the Fire, references both agricultural innovation and the emotional labour of survival – how people have had to continually adapt, resist and protect what matters most.

Luxembourg: Seeds on New Soil

During her residency in neimënster in June 2025, Romero unearthed surprising links between Latin America and Luxembourg. Her research traced the migration of tomato and potato plants – originally domesticated in Latin America more than 6,000 years ago – into Europe. Through archival documents, handwritten letters, and interviews with Luxembourgish farmers, she examined how these crops integrated into local culture.

Potatoes, once a novelty, became a staple – central even to prison diets in 1916. But what struck Romero most was the philosophical similarity between small-scale farmers in Luxembourg, a former agricultural nation, and those in Latin America. One Luxembourgish farmer echoed the Quechua concept of land receptivity: “If a seed doesn’t grow here, we don’t force it. We will try another place.” 

Romero recalls: “I was touched by it, because these people who are working with land, are learning by understanding the process of the land. It was very beautiful for me to find these similarities. You might think the countries are far away but the essential things still connect us.”

Ra’yi: Paraguay (2028)

Romero explains that Paraguay is one of the most unequal countries in Latin America when it comes to land distribution: 2.5% of the population owns 85% of arable land. Here the fertile soil is dominated by agribusiness, primarily for growing genetically modified soy and wheat for export. Small-scale farmers, with access to only 6.4% of land, cannot meet the country’s own food needs.

Ra’yi, meaning “seed” in Guarani, honours those preserving not only biodiversity, but also language and identity. Seeds here are a living archive – repositories of memory, resistance, and cultural continuity. Her work pays tribute to those fighting against erasure, and asserts that protecting seeds means preserving entire ways of being.

Muyu Lab: Ecuador (2020)

Ecuador, Romero’s homeland, plays a pivotal role in her exploration. Muyu Lab highlights ancestral communities and institutions working to curb seed erosion. The national germplasm bank in Quito holds over 28,000 seed samples, while local farmers continue to exchange, domesticate, and refine seeds across generations.

Diversity, she stresses, isn’t just aesthetic – it’s survival. When monoculture and corporate seed control erase variety, they also erase resilience. The work here testifies to the power of continuity – knowledge passed not in data, but in dirt-stained hands.

Blood is a Seed: Colombia

The emotional core of the exhibition is Blood is a Seed, a short film co-narrated by Romero and her father, Oliviero. It’s a poetic excavation of family memory, tracing their journey back to Une, Colombia, in search of their seed guardian ancestors. Her great-grandparents once cultivated numerous varieties of potatoes. “Nowadays, only two potato varieties exist and they are spread with pesticides more than 15 times before they eat them,” Romero laments.

In making the journey, the artist was eager to trace a family link, unearth part of her own identity. What she found in Une was not the romanticised connection she’d hoped for, yet it brought clarity. “That was kind of painful but I also understood, I’m not a farmer. My place is to tell stories. And the memories my father, aunts and cousins have of that place are in some ways an act of resistance to this disappearing life,” she says.

Seeds as Storytelling

Throughout the exhibition, Romero uses seeds as metaphor and method, in her photography, archival research, handwritten notes, video, and interviews. While her process is not methodical, it is deliberate – emotionally charged, grounded in data, and intuitively shaped.

One of the exhibition’s most moving threads is the way it honours slow thinking and slow making. In a hyper-accelerated world, Romero reminds us that just as seeds take time so too do stories. Yet like seeds, stories also risk being lost because of colonisation.

On Resistance – and Re-Existence

In her work, Romero resists the language of resistance. She prefers the concept of re-existence – a term borrowed from a Mexican philosopher-farmer she interviewed. “Resistance is always about fighting against something,” she explains. But re-existence is about asserting another way of life.

That distinction matters. Her work doesn’t rage; it listens. It doesn’t push; it invites. It asks: what would it mean to live in a world where seeds – and the people who care for them –mattered more than profit?

If seeds carry stories into the future, the story that Fume, Root, Seed leaves behind is one of gentle provocation and critical thinking. Romero hopes it encourages us to ask new questions about the food we eat: Where did this come from? Who cared for it? What knowledge has been lost – or preserved – through it? Interestingly, she shuns the activist label, preferring to describe her work as storytelling with purpose. “Maybe it has no utility,” she says with humility. “But maybe it can start a conversation.”

And that might be enough. Like a seed, after all, every conversation begins small. Not every seed grows. But some do – and when they do, they carry worlds within them.

The free exhibition Isadora Romero: Humo Semilla Raíz (Fume Root Seed) runs at neimënster until 30 September.